


Muses: A Smoke and Noise Interlude

by madame_faust



Series: Smoke and Noise [2]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disabled Character of Color, M/M, Not Beta Read, Not Own Voices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26032192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madame_faust/pseuds/madame_faust
Summary: After a long day of dazzling the bourgeois and delighting the lower orders, Erik simply want to enjoy a quiet night at home with his lover - but Rahim's muse has other plans. A companion story to 'Smoke and Noise,' from Erik's perspective.
Relationships: Erik | Phantom of the Opera/The Persian
Series: Smoke and Noise [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1931311
Comments: 9
Kudos: 14





	Muses: A Smoke and Noise Interlude

**Author's Note:**

> I am struck by two strong creative desires: to write a Persian who wears glasses and write a relationship where Erik isn't the only artist in the couple. This was the result. Also I'm probably going to write a flashback fic where they go ballooning, so, y'know. There's that to look forward to.

The doorman of their little rented flat had to be familiar with the skeleton in mismatched clothes that troubled him to open the door at all sorts of odd hours every night. This was one of his earlier evenings - home not much past midnight, though the aforementioned skeleton took the stairs two at a time in his haste to ascend to the flat. There had been a blaze of light visible from the street; Rahim was awake.

There was something pleasant, to be sure, in creeping in, quiet as a mouse and slithering under the bedclothes, breath ghosting by Rahim’s good ear, fingers playing a sweet melody upon his bare skin, making him shiver and groan into wakefulness.

But there was a lovely theatricality in bursting through the door, flinging aside his coat and calling out, ‘I’M HERE!’ in a voice that shook the rafters and infuriated the neighbors. 

Erik was a creature of extremes: splendid and sordid. Loud and quiet. Blinding light or darkest shadow. He did not thrive living in a comfortable, middling sort of way.

However, no sooner had he thrown open the door than his plans for a dramatic entrance were scuttled; Rahim had lit a fire for the light and his back was to him, hands covered in clay. He was working.

For all that Rahim blustered about Erik’s carelessness with money, it did not follow that of the two of them he should be the _flighty_ artist with the coy and often-absent muse and Erik the workmanlike draftsman, sketching out the plans for magic tricks with the rote fondness clerks reserved for ledgers and numbers. But so it was. Pity. After an evening of reciting common fortunes to little girls, he thought he deserved a thrill.

And so, the quiet rather than the raucous. Erik shed his mask, overcoat, waistcoat, braces, shoes, trousers, the lot. The campfire stink would remain on his hair until he next washed it. 

Thus _un_ -attired, he was determined to make an impactful - if quiet - entrance, until he saw the sketches scattered like fallen leaves upon the ground.

It was, unless Erik was very much mistaken, the face of the young man Mademoiselle Daae favored. The one who almost purchased him for fifty francs. The one who so insulted Rahim in the offering (Erik, for his part, was half-flattered - his attention had been sold for far fewer than fifty francs in the past). With an impatient click of his tongue, he let the paper fall on the floor. Rahim worked on, moulding the clay into what Erik perceived, over his shoulder, to be a rude approximation of the young man’s head. 

Padding into the bedroom, he covered himself in a robe; he and Rahim were of such an old and enduring understanding that he could not be _jealous_ that his paramour’s muse had been awakened by the sight of this bright young thing. Still, he was not _so_ self-absorbed that he could compare himself (middle-aged, hideous, thin as a scarecrow) with Mademoiselle Daae’s young man (no more than twenty-five, handsome as Adonis, and broad as Eugen Sandow) and not find himself lacking. So. The robe. A pair of slippers. And then he shuffled back into their sitting room cum studio, the cadaver masquerading as a genteel fellow, settling in for a quiet evening at home with his beloved.

One of the perks of Rahim’s bad hearing meant that Erik could make an arse of himself constantly, but it hardly mattered so long as his beloved did not turn round. The partial deafness was a constant source of guilt, like a stubborn old ulcer that refused to heal up…but it did have its advantages. 

With a practiced grace, Erik sank into a chair just within Rahim’s line of slight. The movement at the corner of his vision caused him to raise his eyes, flashing green behind the gold-rimmed spectacles he wore when he worked. And he smiled, hands falling away from the half-formed face of clay to regard the half-formed face of flesh in front of him. 

It would be an exaggeration to say that Erik’s chest puffed up with pride, but his heart did give a little skip of delight. 

_Mine. All mine_ , it crowed proudly and possessively. Where once Rahim had been a beautiful youth of twenty, age had been kind to him, and transformed him into a positively distinguished man of forty-five. 

Twenty-five years. When they met, Erik had little expectation of seeing twenty-five years of life, let alone living them with _such_ a man. Thank God men so rarely got what they deserved. 

“Was your slumming profitable?” Rahim asked, voice gently ironic. Erik only _just_ managed to keep from rolling his yellow eyes. A five-times-removed cousin of the Shah, grandson to the chief of police in a sunny province, his beloved was not without flaws and an abysmal snobbery was foremost among them. 

But Erik himself was doubly flawed: an irritating bohemian pretension was the worst of his. At least, so Rahim insisted. 

“I do not perform for the love of money,” Erik said, placing a spidery hand over his heart and affecting a posture of great martyrdom. “I preform for love of the craft. The smiles and appreciation of my audience are worth a king’s ransom to me!”

Rahim snorted and rose from his place, to wash his hands in a prepared basin and wrap his unfinished work in wet burlap to keep it drying out. His hands were still damp when he approached Erik and made him budge up so they could both of them settle upon the settee. 

If Erik thought Rahim’s thoughts tended to romance, he was mistaken. It was not delightful purposes he put his mouth to, but merely to issue a scolding. 

“Reading cards that tell young men they’re going to have a sudden windfall and young women they’re destined to marry barons is poor practice,” he sighed, looking up at him through thick black eyelashes which would have been then envy of the gaggle of girls. It made him look both stern and coquettish, both moods were equally effective in making Erik melt - turning him to putty in his hands rather.

Erik could not help it; he laughed at his own joke, which made Rahim frown. The discontent only made him look more beautiful. 

“I don’t know why you bother,” he shook his head, hair flopping onto his forehead. Dusted throughout with silver threads, but as full and thick as it had been twenty-five years ago. Lucky bastard. 

“It’s how I was reared and bred,” Erik explained. “A child of the roadways and the caravans. When I had nothing else I had my cards and my wits and, if I have nothing else, I shall be able to fall back on that. A hunched, toothless old beggar who can still charm a centime out of a girl if he tells her she’s lovely and she’ll marry well.”

The frown deepened and - _oh!_ \- Erik couldn’t have been more delighted. He wriggled slightly, sliding his body more fully under Rahim’s being merry crushed. Rahim shifted his arms around either side of his head, trapping him. _Delicious._

“You’re brilliant,” he sighed, as a chastisement. “Why can’t you simply…be brilliant?”

“Because that would keep me home on off nights,” Erik pointed out generously. ‘And then where would you find the time to indulge your more mundane tastes?”

He gestured languidly to the shrouded clay, the sketches - alright he wasn’t quite so even-tempered about his lover’s apparent fixation as he would like to be. But _really!_ Rahim ought to have been more sensitive. In coupling himself to a living corpse, he ought not recreate a countenance so lively and handsome. How was one meant to compete?

The frustrated expression shifted into one of confusion. Rahim followed the line of Erik’s arm and his brow cleared when he saw the object of his displeasure. 

“Oh!” he exclaimed softly. “That. No, it’s got nothing to do with - alright, _partially_ , but - here, _look_.”

Rahim got up to retrieve a sketch and left Erik cold and bereft on the settee. When he returned it was to sit at his feet and Erik sat up in turn, grumpily turning his non-existent nose up at the proffered drawing. 

“No, thank you.”

“Erik,” Rahim’s tone was soft and cajoling - the very tone which he knew Erik could neither resist nor deny. “ _Look._ ”

Thus ordered, he did look, at first, seeing nothing at all but a handsome, well-made face, painstakingly recreated. But upon further inspection, the image took on a quality which made it intensely discomfiting to the viewer. There was a distinct and altogether subtle look of pain about the eyes and mouth. A deep sorrow. Regret? Perhaps. But not quite.

“When I refused him, he looked back at the girl he was with,” Rahim said by way of explanation. “And his face…I’ve never seen anything like it. Not that expression on one so young and so refined. It was there for a second. Just a second. But its been haunting me ever since.”

Erik would be a poor master of magic indeed if he begrudged Rahim a good haunting. With a nod, he passed the image back to him. 

“Curious,” he acknowledged. And not really his concern. His attentions were taken up by the other member of that little duo. The girl. Mademoiselle Daae.

Would she come on the morrow? Likely not; she seemed a sensible, worldly sort of girl…even so. There was a chance. And her _voice!_

It was a plaintive voice, a sad voice, miserably stifled by her training at the Conservatoire, but beneath the nerves and schooling was a purity of tone, a breadth of range that excited him. Were it not for the roads and caravans he himself might have gone in for music to earn his bread and butter and not showmanship. Naturally, there were only so many stages a specimen like himself might appear on…but one could speculate. He might have been a teacher were his origins more genteel and his upbringing more conventional. 

“That reminds me,” Erik mentioned off-handedly. “I might have an early morning caller. Or I might not.”

“So what you’re saying is you ought to hie to bed and get yourself some sleep?” Rahim spoke - ah! And there was a second flaw of his. In addition to snobbery, he was also forever putting words in Erik’s mouth. Damnable nuisance.

“I did hope you would join me,” Erik suggested. “Unless you prefer the doleful expression of your sad boy to my poor company.”

Rahim chuckled, picked up Erik’s left hand in his right, and kissed it. “Jealously does not become you.”

“Nothing becomes me,” Erik retorted, tightening his grip on Rahim’s hand. “So let’s put out the lights.”


End file.
